I thought I'd share some of my many thoughts on the conference also in hopes that others will chime in. I have to agree with all of Steve's comments, and the others that have been posted. I think these conferences and aoir were meant to happen, and I come home really excited about the continued intellectual stimulation and the interpersonal opportunities they offer. Like everyone else who went, I didn't get to hear as many papers as I wanted, not just because there were too many to choose from, but often because I found myself in a conversation that I didn't want to leave. The papers I did see were overall very good, and offered what I think is missing from internet work at other conferences -- the assumption that the audience knew a lot already, which meant many things were presented at higher levels than they would be elsewhere. I was also particularly struck by the quality of discussions that followed presentations. I would look around the room and see many people, including but importantly not limited to many whose work I have read and admired, engaging in really substantive conversation about advanced issues while everyone leaned forward, paid full attention, and nodded. I saw that level of high quality interaction and engagement repeated in room after room. There were also a number of interesting synergies and points of repetition between papers both within and across panels. A few recurrent themes that struck me: A strong shift to conceptualizing the internet as integrated into everyday life. Calls for differentiated understandings of the internet and its users. Curiousity about what we might learn from thinking about the significance of the net in terms of its absence. I'm sure others noted other conceptual themes, and I would really like to hear them. I was worried after Sept 11 that our international attendance might suffer, and I was thrilled at the internationalism of the event. On top of a dose of many of my favorite americans, i got to speak with people from denmark, austria, australia, the netherlands, finland, norway, sweden, israel, england, india, france, italy, canada, and more, and i know there were people i didn't get to speak with from still other nations. At every panel, there were multiple accents in the discussion. I admire the many people who contributed to this conference in English though it is not their native toungue and who flew long expensive flights across big time changes to get there. Thanks for the extra effort. It really affirmed that we NEED people from multiple points of view to keep us reminded of our own limitations and open up new avenues of thought. I really look forward to being in Maastricht next year. The conference's intellectual substance also made me think a lot about what aoir is and can become. Phil Agre's excellent keynote, which many of you missed, argued (among other things) that internet research is not a field but "a network of unique hybrids," by which he meant that each of us is a person who by the very nature of looking at the internet represents bridges our field of origin and other areas. A panel that followed later in the morning on social capital got me thinking of this association as a _community network_ of unique hybrids, and drove home for me that the point of aoir should be to raise the social capital of all of us hybrids. Part of this is providing opportunities like this conference to network with other individuals. Part of this will be providing resources such as archives of syllabi, papers, abstracts, data sets. There are also a lot of things we can do that we haven't thought of yet. We have the experts on using the internet to build community and raise communal social capital within our ranks, and I hope that those of you who study these things as observers might be motivated to apply them proactively to build our community. And I hope that anyone with ideas about what aoir can do will raise those ideas for discussion or email them to me offlist. For me, this conference did feel like community in a way that other conferences (except last years!) do not. The fact that so many people came back after last year made many faces familiar. Even though I didn't know most of the people there, I looked around the room so many times and thought that this crowd didn't look like a collection of colleagues but like a feast of friends. That the people I have taken to be my intellectual colleagues turn out to also be the sorts I want as friends is a massive treat. This was facilitated by everyone's casual and friendly attitude and attire, which made starting conversations easy. I think we succeeded in setting aside boundaries between disciplinary perspectives, topics of specific interest, nations, professional rank, and so on. I hope this tone continues for years. In this time of international violence and fear, being with this crowd was a wonderful and needed refuge. Thanks. I'm saving bits to help the war effort, so will stop here. Please share your thoughts were you there. And please come next year if you weren't. Nancy _______________________________________________________________ Nancy Baym, Communication Studies University of Kansas NEW! email: nbaym@ku.edu NEW! snail mail: 102 Bailey, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045, USA NEW! url: http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym